Thursday, October 22, 2015

This is the comic I did for the Faction anthology's special climate change issue "High Water". It's part of a much bigger story that includes these guys and this too. I really would like to fully flesh that stuff out at some point... Faction has a whole buncha great stuff in it, nab a copy by clicking on these words!

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

At one point the poor li'l robot gets punted with an electro-magnetic pulse weapon that incapacitates him (oops that's a spoiler). These are the initial sketches for this Chappie-zapping device. It was described as a prototype, one-off workbench thing but Neill thought the ones on the left were a little too rudimentary.

This is the design we went with. It was one of my first attempts at modelling something in Sketchup and it was shabby as hell. I had to paint over it a lot to make it even slightly presentable.

This is an image from the book with Leri's graphic pass on it, here's Huge Ackman waving it about:

Rough and quick sketches of the vehicle that Ninja and Yolandi cruise around in, suggested title "Die Vandwoord"

Some of the designs for the neuro-helm used to control the Moose

A few of us in the design room had a couple of goes at designing what ended up being the Moose over the years Chappie was in production. Most of my early ones were awful and I sure aint gonna put em on here, Aaron did some rad ones though and you can see them on his blog

None of them really clicked with Neill though and he ended up sending though a rough model he'd made for me to paint over and resolve. It was rad, dunno why he doesn't just do all his own design work. I'm glad he wastes his time being a successful writer and director though or I'd be back out sleeping in the streets.

He also wanted some weaponry options so I did a pass with a ludicrous amount of missiles, guns, grenade launchers, saws and lasers on it with note saying "pick the ones you want to use". He just went "yip, all of them". That's my kind of directing!

Here's the full scale prop built here at Weta Workshop. Seeing this thing come together was amazing. I used to go steal peeks at it during construction but towards the end I held back from sneaking in there so I could take in the finished build with fresh eyes. Cripes, it worked! That thing was magnificent! It really had a commanding presence and felt totally convincing as a piece of military hardware, a super impressive combination of skills and techniques coming together to create something quite remarkable.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Here's some more robots from Chappie that I assume will get their own spinoff films at some point.

Rory and Dexter are Deon's homemade pals designed for maximum crib-chillin' and anti-lonely abilities. They were to be made from various toys n' junk and utilise his high-end custom AI software.

These guys were fun to work on, really quick designs and after a bit of tweakage from Leri they went to the workshop floor to be built. They were both brilliant little radio-controlled builds, fully practical characters and their performances were captured entirely in-camera.

Some of the first sketches for the Robo-Yolandi. RoLandi? These ones were a bit generic, there were a few I did later that I thought explored some more interesting ideas and construction techniques but are currently confined to the ever growing library of unapproved film art AKA the Cosmic Trash Receptacle.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Chappie was a pretty big project for me (at Weta Workshop obv), one that was a lot of fun and a heckuva lot of work over about 4 years. Here's a few images from the art-of book.

So many of the jobs we work never get art approvals to show our work so I'm grateful to be allowed to share this odd selection, I'll try to fill in the gaps!

The first designs of Chappie himself unfortunately aren't covered in the book. The world's best Greg Broadmore did a bunch of rad concepts right at the start and got it to a pretty well resolved state, after some more notes came through I did a bunch of head designs, Leri did his thang with the graphics and he was kinda done. For a while! This was back in 2010.

We used that design to generate a bunch of images for what Neill Blomkamp called the graphic novel, kinda key-scene story boards to help pitch the film to the studio. A bunch of us in the design room bashed these pieces out real quick and rough, we didn't really expect them to ever see the light of day but of course they were the first concept pieces released. Shame! Here's a few I did, you can see an early version of the scout robot in 'em. Just don't look too close, yearghhh!

We were working with Neill on Elysium at the same time as the early Chappie stuff and finished that project off before he came back with Chappie developments. He'd had the too talented/nice/hardworking/humble/obese (I'm assuming he is obese) Doug Williams develop the design some more. This became the basis for the next round of designs I worked up and there's still a lot of Doug in the Chappie that ended up on screen. Seriously! He's all over it!

These head sketches were after a few more rounds of notes from Neill, still pretty rough:

I had a crack at some first-round paint schemes, Neill wisely got Leri Greer to do the finals though:

This is pretty much the final design with Leri's masterful graphics and decals helping to hide my wonky rendering. I should say there were a lot of iterations getting to this point! There were dozens and dozens, all pretty incremental though.

Weta would be building full scale, highly detailed mannequins that were to be used throughout the film. We needed to know how the story events would affect his look so I did a series of damage progression illustrations using the script as reference, here's a couple of them:

The 2D designs informed the 3D model build, which was handled by the geniuses at Image Engine. Their work was fantastic, they totally nailed his character right from the get-go. It was really rewarding and fun seeing their work progressing every couple of days. There were often tweaks, details or new features that needed to be added so I'd paint onto screengrabs of their work-in-progress models:

These pictures are a very small fraction of the art produced on the film, it'd be cool to go more in depth with some of the details, features and dead-ends at some point if we get more image approvals.

Right at the end when the practical, screen-ready mannequins had been finished and were just about to be crated up and sent to the filming location we got a new note from Neill. He realised he needed a point of eye contact on the robot's face, something that would correlate with where the actors were looking at Sharlto's face and give the audience something to connect with. I did a few visor designs real quick, Neill picked one and the guys here at the workshop built it and sent it attached to the robot the very next day. Crazy fast! I don't have an approved image of that design to show here but here's how he looked it the film:

Odd how similar it is to the early designs from way back^^^ looking at it now... huh!

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Hi! How's things? You're looking good! Like real good, dang!
Here's a few of the little airplanes I've been drawing lately, been trying to do one a day and am just about up to fifty of 'em. They're all done on my phone (Note 3) using the Sketchbook for Galaxy app.

I think I'll do a poster if I get enough of them done before I get too bored or start doing anything useful with my life, probably something similar to the Deadly Sleds one.

I'm posting them daily* over at my instagram if you're into that kinda thing

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Here's a couple of illustrations I did that were used on billboards waaaay back in dickity-twelve. I had a great time doing 'em!
When the nice folks at 99.co.nz contacted me to do some drawings inspired by the Weird Wheels trading cards I was all like "yes. Yes please."
Did I ever tell you I have a complete set of those Weird Wheels cards and they're framed hanging on the wall next to me right now? No? Remind me to tell you that sometime.